ok folks, I used smart ripper to rip the dvd, then dvdshrink to shrink it down. THe files are small enough to burn to one dvd-r(w) and powerdvd can play the file successfully on my hard drive. I open Nero (6) and tell it to burn a dvd, it creates the emtpy project with an audio_ts folder and a video_ts folder. I copy all my .vob, .ifo and .bup files into the video_ts folder and burn.

The computer has a toshiba DVD-Rom and the NEC ND1300A DVD+-R(W) drive. If I put the copied DVD-RW into the toshiba, the little light comes on stays on and windows says no disc. If I put it in the NEC, the light comes on and all is well, except that powerdvd says that the disc is not valid that it must have a scratch or something on it, that is if I try to play it as a DVD. If I tell powerdvd to load the files on it as if they were on just another hard drive, and manually point to the video_TS folder, it seems to work wonderfully.

I think I am close here folks, but I must be missing something. Some magic step that allows other drives to read this disc properly. Any clues? (BTW, I have not actually tried this in my dvd player yet (the apex ad703) since it does nto support DVD-RWs -- only DVD-Rs (according to this site) and I would like to get the procedure down before I start burning real discs)